In my head I see a door. Just a heavy iron door. Too firmly bolted. Impossible to open. Nobody knows what’s behind that door. It has multiple locks on it. None of these locks have any keys. The door will stay shut for eternity. Every now and then I hear a quiver. A female voice. My imagination runs wild – i wonder who is behind the door? I can’t picture how she looks. Did she, like every other girl, feel pressured to change her appearance to fit in superfluous beauty standards?
Was she abandoned by her father at a tender age too? Did she spend a big part of her life trying to people please, and erasing her entire personality in the process? Was she brought up to be “nice” and soft and voiceless like every other girl? Is she now behind this door because she couldn’t speak up for herself when they were locking her up?
I hope she hasn’t lost herself completely to become a good daughter. I hope her mother wasn’t too hard on her, trying to make her a perfect woman in a man’s world. I pray she doesn’t spend the rest of her life trying not to be her mother. The voice of her sobs are scattered in the air again, and the question remains.
Who is behind the door? And what makes her cry? Is it the desolation of the lifetime, being married to the wrong guy? Is it the dejection that comes from being touched inappropriately? Could it be a burning rage over an outrageously hyper masculine beast, who laid his hand on her supposed fragility?
Is it the self-loathing that ends up becoming self-sabotage, for she was brought up to always feel less than a man?
Who locked her up like that, in a body that was so easy to be mistreated? Who gave her those curves that make the men lose their humanity? Who is to blame? She’ll carry the burden of being their prey forever, and nobody would ever check the man. They’ll curse her womanhood and put the onus on her existence. She’s the reason she’s unhappy. She’s the reason she’ll never know peace.
She must have dodged a million bullets before they confined her behind a door. Maybe it’s for her own good, this way at least she’s safe. Safe and out of the sight, of a big “strong” man. At least she won’t have to be in the kitchen for the rest of her life. She wouldn’t have to be the perfect daughter, perfect wife, perfect mother, perfect slave. This way she’s away from those choices that she never willingly made.
Maybe this cage is better than the cage outside. The world outside knows no restraint. Every man is too much of a man here. And every woman is asking herself – who she is – every moment, every day.
They’re behind doors that they can’t break open. Doors that take their own selves away from them. They have locks on their tongues and on their minds. A shut door is all their story is; all they have in the name of a life is – an unbreakable, choking and manipulative door.